January 2011

Bernard Weisberger raised many important points in “American History Is Falling Down” (February/March issue). I bet you’re going to get howls of complaint from the academics. Please allow me to put my two cents into the debate. I’m one of those Ph.D.’s (UCLA, 1970) who was crunched by the job market. Unlike my colleagues who ended up as frustrated cab drivers or untenured academic gypsies, I fell back on secondary teaching for survival. Also rather untypically, I continued to research and write. Although I held no college positions other than part-time instructor at a local community college, I did publish my dissertation, two subsequent books, and many articles and book reviews.

On the edge of a pond a few blocks from my home, there is a knee-high chunk of granite with a bronze plate on one side, marking the spot where a band of Spanish soldiers commanded by a captain named Juan Bautista de Anza pitched camp on a March afternoon in 1776. They were scouting the site of what is now San Francisco, and like most San Franciscans ever since, they came here hoping to change their lives.

Fifty years ago this May, when the Golden Gate Bridge was opened to the world, Joseph Strauss, the chief engineer of the project, wrote a poem of jubilation:

Charleston is and always will be a small town, the citadel of a “hereditary Nobility,” as its founders willed it to be. In its early days Charleston was a walled city, and in some sense it has continued as such, though the walls long ago vanished. The boundary markers of historic Charleston today are, in addition to its implacable sense of self, the Ashley and the Cooper rivers, which meet at the tip of the Charleston peninsula, and Broad Street, the third side of the triangle. Within this district, along the streets with their ancient names (such as Meeting, Tradd, Church, King, Legare), stands a high proportion of the important houses of Charleston—important because they are unique and beautiful, a national heritage. Many of them are older than the United States itself.

At American Heritage we believe in ghosts. We think they make good company—particularly when you travel. And that’s why I find this special issue so exciting; it’s brimming with spirits—the spirits who inhabit battlefields and monuments, city streets and desert cliffs. the ghosts of history who bring travel alive.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald are here, splashing drunkenly in the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. The essence of FDR’s personality is mirrored in his mother’s home at Hyde Park. The long gone and distant people who cut their homes into the rock of the Southwest stare at us from across centuries. And in the pages here we can feel the pulse of those who have gone before us even where there are no physical reminders to jog our memories.

One morning in early October 1849, Henry David Thoreau peered through the rainstreaked window of a stagecoach as it rolled along a sandy, rutted road on the north shore of Cape Cod. He found the landscape bleak and almost bare of trees, the houses poor and weather-beaten. Even the women’s faces were cheerless. “They had prominent chins and noses,” he wrote, “having lost all their teeth, and a sharp W would represent their profile.”

The traveler’s view is much more agreeable today. While modern dentistry has taken care of the women with faces like Ws, nature has been induced to line the road with fine shade trees. For the traveler who is not in a hurry, the northshore road along the bay—Route 6A—is by far the prettiest way to go. Most travelers, of course, are in a hurry and so take Route 6, the mid-Cape highway, which is a straight shot to the outer Cape, with not much to look at except exit signs and pitch pines.

On a recent pilgrimage to Abilene—that epic little town on the Kansas plains that briefly marked the uttermost frontier of the Western world —I stepped into the old timber-frame homestead of the Eisenhowers and felt that part of my life had completed a circle. There, in the cluttered formality of the tiny parlor with its dainty drapes and edifying literature, so bravely genteel compared with the dusty cattledriving life outside, Dwight David Elsenhower was raised for leadership in the greatest military adventure of the twentieth century. It was an adventure that brought the two of us, unwittingly, very close together.

Twenty years ago nobody thought much about saving old buildings. The phrase urban renewal had an optimistic, forward-looking sound to it, and entire urban centers were razed with little thought of what might be lost in the process. Today communities across America are fighting to save their architectural heritage. James Marston Fitch, more than any other individual, has championed that cause. Born in Wash- ington, D.C., he grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in a family proud of its pre-Revolutionary American ancestors but numbering among its members many whom he considers failures. At the age of fifteen he entered the University of Alabama intending to become an engineer. The following year he transferred to the architectural program at Tulane, but financial reverses forced him to leave after two years and find a job. At the beginning of his career he designed traditional houses; later he became a staunch advocate of the modern style.